I’m planning on going to New York City in a few weeks to attend a cryptography conference but while I’m there I plan on visiting Columbia University to investigate the distance-ed engineering program office for the Columbia Video Network.

I’ve mentioned it before but it’s looking more and more like a great option for me. The program is rigorous, bears no difference in coursework with the on-campus program, and can be completed completely off-campus. As I’ve come to this realization, I started to look deeper at the classes that I might sign up for.

That’s when I saw that some of the most notable people in the Internet’s history were teaching classes offered by CVN. One in particular bears mentioning: Steven Bellovin.

Prof. Belovin is co-teaching a class called COMS W4180: Network Security and it looks like it might be an excellent example of a class that offers a world-class professor to a wide Internet based audience. Prof. Bellovin had a front row seat for the development of the Internet and is probably at least partly responsible for many of the protocols and mechanisms that we use today. As a grad student, he invented USENET, probably the first and most widely used means of distributing information across the Internet even today. He also wrote the famous “Firewall” book published by O’Reilly that I used to understand and configure them. It’s going to be exciting having the opportunity to take his class. I’m certain that he can offer a lot of context to the problems of security on networks.

This brings up another point: you should figure out what you want to study in graduate school and go to the school where that is being studied. I live close to several world-class universities but only one of them is doing anything remotely connected to network security or cryptography. A couple of others are focusing on other topics like bioinformatics or wireless networks. Most of the rest don’t even have a computer science program of note. Having faculty support for a particular area of study is important and if you are all by yourself studying some field, the chances that you’ll waste your time on unproductive areas of research goes up tremendously.

Since I don’t have the luxury of attending a traditional program, I’m more constrained than others in the choices of programs that I can pursue. It’s a lucky break that there are programs out there that will cater to my choice of field but still permit me to maintain full-time employment.